Communities

IET Communities provide like-minded people with opportunities to share ideas, collaborate, learn and network. With more than 100 Local and Technical Networks around the world, you can feel confident of finding a community that suits your interests.

I had a flyer in a magazine that promised something that was too good to be true.
Technical details comprised of an offer to send someone round, so I asked the obvious questions such as storage capacity and expected start and finish temperatures after 7 hours charge and after 17 hours of no charge.
Again an e-mail saying that I really need to have someone come and show me the system (and I expect a quote). Not basic technical information for a product claimed to replace off peak storage heating at lower cost.

I have off-peak electric storage. Apart from putting us on white meter and that it does keep us warm I'm afraid I don't have too much to offer in praise. Basically the problem is that, like so many DESIGNERS today, this designer didn't
make the effort to study the problem. It begins with the left-handed offer from the elec. company to sell you electrical power during those hours of darkness at a cheap(er) rate to offset the cost of keeping spinning machinery in operation tlo cope with unexpected demands (it can take a long time to bring an idle machine into operation). That is a matter of honesty; power for our heaters is available from midnight until 0100 hours and from 0200 to 0800.

The heaters consist of slabs of concrete interwoven with heating wires controlled by a settable thermostat but that controls only the temperature to which the Store is heated. Given thot the environmental temp. may change during the early hours we often awake into a veritable hot-house ... and there is not a damn thing you can do about it except to open every door and window available.

There iks a second control knob which opens/closes a shutter that allows air to circulate around the heated blocks; releases a blast of hot air - should you need it - but which rapidly cools the machine so that you start to freeze from around 1600 .

What is required is a steel enclosure so that the heater does not waste its stored heat when it is not required. A second-rate alternative is to put a small shelf over the thing to impede the hot-air flow - which is not of much use anyway.